


Ennui

by Derien



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-01
Updated: 2004-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-14 12:33:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derien/pseuds/Derien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for "Monsterous Regiment"!</p><p>From my original notes: <i>I got wondering at some of Maladicta's actions.  She watched<br/>Polly to the point that Polly noticed and found it unnerving.  She continued to<br/>hide her gender after all the others had revealed theirs.  How was it that she<br/>decided to put on her uniform and set out again on the same day and hour that<br/>Polly did?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Ennui

**Author's Note:**

> _Disclaimers: Maladicta and Polly and their whole world belong to the inestimable  
>  Mr. Pratchett. I'm not making any money off of this and not much to speak of off  
> my actual day job, either, so don't bother to sue me. The first line is directly  
> from the book and the last two lines I paraphrased just a little. I can't take  
> any credit for the description of her smile._
> 
>  _Notes: This is for Tronella, who said, "If you write Maladict/Ozzer I will love  
>  you forever.:)" And I told her I didn't have time. And then I spent lots of time  
> trying to think about other things and be productive on other stories, but I can't  
> stay away from this idea. This may not be the story she hoped for, but it was the  
> one I had to tell. ..._
> 
>  _Credit where it's due: Thanks to Daegaer and Eor for extensive commentaries and  
>  several re-readings, and again to Eor for listening to me chatter on and on about  
> the story incessantly._
> 
> Also, the original publication date is a guess at this time, because I forgot to put it on.

"Maladicta had disappeared." But of course everyone is somewhere, until they're  
discorporated into their component molecules.

She began her disappearance by taking her new dress uniform with its Corporal's  
stripes and folding it tightly into the very bottom of her new travelling trunk  
under her gleaming new coffee making engine. The uniform had been specially  
designed for the last recruits of the Tenth Foot Light Infantry, also known as  
the Ins-and-Outs, after they had brought peace to the country of Borogravia.  
They had enlisted in the army dressed as boys, but when it was discovered that  
they weren't, their trousers were taken away. Their new uniform had a skirt, it  
was feminine in cut, and in it they had been paraded around and turned into cute  
non-threatening little female mascots. Angry and confused, she told none of the  
other Ins-and-Outs where she was going, sealing her disappearance.

Raised in a very traditional vampire family of Borogravia, she had rebelled, as  
the young often do. Two years ago she'd joined the wearers of the black ribbon  
and transferred her addiction - she no longer drank human blood. Though the  
craving never entirely went away, she had learned to assuage it with coffee.  
Still, with the turmoil she was in at the moment she thought of the dark makeup  
and black lace nostalgically. It was a defined role that she knew how to play,  
behind which she could hide herself. Finding her parents and brother guesting at  
the estate of a family friend, she joined them there, moving on with them when  
they went to their winter quarters in the city where they met up with two of her  
sisters.

She sat quietly in the corners of the drawing rooms, and sat, too, at the parties  
and dances. The young men still didn't want to dance with her, though now they  
attempted to waylay her in the dark end of the garden or the back hall. She had  
at least gone from being "that boring black-ribboner" to being an object of gossip.  
Although gossip was attention, and attention of any sort usually warmed a vampire's  
ego, along with this notoriety came thinly veiled barbs and ridicule. She endured  
numerous comments about how black velvet looked much better on her than red and  
white, and how short hair was unbecoming and made her face look sharp. Maladicta  
privately thought a sharp look suited her quite well. Her mother remarked that  
she couldn't imagine a daughter of hers in trousers. "How terribly gauche," she  
sniffed. Her family members did their best to ignore her when there were others  
present, and her younger sister openly complained that her own chances of making  
a good match had been ruined by Maladicta's behaviour.

Yet through the long dull evenings in the drawing rooms or sitting at the edges  
of the parties she was haunted by a scent which whispered below the perfumes  
surrounding her. There had been seven young women disguised as boys who had joined  
the Ins-and-Outs, but the other five stood like flat shadows in her memory behind  
the flame that was Polly. Polly, whom she still sometimes thought of as Ozzer.

Poetry writing being an acceptable pastime among vampires, she would sometimes sit  
down with her pen and paper, but the result would be a list of words, each scratched  
out and replaced by another. Words like 'aspiration,' 'motion,' 'action,' 'thought  
and desire into reality.' That last phrase was heavily scratched out, and the word  
'desire' almost completely obliterated.

Falling into a malaise, she retired to one of the ancestral country homes, the  
mouldering little castle in the hills from which she had first set out dressed in  
boy's clothes, months before. The castle clung precariously to the rocky pine-clad  
slope high above the road to Munz. Munz, where she knew Polly had gone to tend her  
father's inn, The Duchess. She couldn't quite bring herself to go visit Polly, but  
it felt a little ... not better, certainly not easier, but somehow more right, to be  
geographically nearer to her.

The only servants at the castle were an elderly couple who had been in service to her  
family all their lives. Their lives had been greatly prolonged by this service -  
their son-in-law looked as though he could be a grandfather - yet even so the castle  
was too large for two elderly people to keep up with the maintenance.

One morning not long after she'd arrived at the castle Maladicta wandered along a  
castle wall under a sky which sat like a pewter lid on the hilltops when a movement  
between the pines below caught her eye. It quickly resolved into a small sleigh.  
This would be the son-in-law arriving with supplies, as he did every ten days. She  
knew he would have some coffee for her, as she'd been running low, but she waited  
until he left before descending through the many halls and flights of stairs to the  
stone-flagged kitchen. She had come here because she didn't want to have to talk to  
anyone and had avoided him so far.

The kitchen was the domain of the old woman, always warm because of the huge fireplace  
which she kept always burning (Maladicta suspected they slept there when none of  
her own family was in residence). The old woman looked up from her mending and  
gestured toward the table with a silent frown, indicating not only the location of  
the bag but also her opinion of a vampire drinking coffee.

Maladicta breathed in the heady scent appreciatively, a shiver of delight running  
down her back. Having replaced her addiction to blood with coffee she now needed  
to have coffee always available; withdrawals could and had sent her into a  
hallucinatory state, and she never wanted to experience that again. After she had  
recovered from the hallucinations and subsequent jitters she had thought of making  
a necklace of beans so that she'd never be faced with the situation again. So that  
her friends would never again be faced with the choice of possibly having to drive  
a stake through her heart to save their own lives. Somehow she hadn't gotten around  
to it, yet, but now as she stood in the warm kitchen and breathed in this scent she  
recalled Polly saying that it was a good idea. She put a handful of beans in her  
pocket and spent some time wandering around the castle trying to find something  
with which to drill holes and a cord to string them on. It wasn't as if she had  
anything else she needed to do.

Up in her room she pulled back the heavy deep red velvet curtains to let the light  
in on her desk, and began to drill. A few beans broke, but they would all get ground  
later. She couldn't fit many on the string, with a knot between each one to keep  
it safe, but she thought it would do in a pinch. When she pulled the cord tight  
the dark brown beans lay against her white throat. She admired the somewhat savage  
look of it, and found herself hoping Polly would, too.

When she next happened to see the son-in-law's sleigh arriving she decided to speak  
to him. Running to her room and delving through the closet she found a red velvet  
gown which she shook the dust out of and quickly pulled on. She encountered him in  
the kitchen and, after officially making his acquaintance and asking how prices were  
in Munz and if it had been hard to find any of the needed items, asked him if he  
knew of a Duchess Inn in Munz, and the innkeeper's daughter.

He gave her a sharp look and she thought he was noting her short hair, but all he  
said aloud was, "Oh, aye, the lass is a great help to her father, I'm sure."

"She must have a sweetheart by now...?"

That question thawed him a bit. "No, miss, and to my mind the sooner her father gets  
her married off the better. Though where he'll find someone who'd have her I don't  
know. She's a bit of a wild one, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Yes. She is." She gave him a smile that displayed her teeth.

With more privacy she attempted more poetry, which included a lot of phrases about  
hiding, about images and facades, about lures and traps for fabulous beasts which  
ignored the bait that they were offered.

She had known she'd made a good-looking young man, and she'd held out hope that  
Polly would fall for that good-looking young man. When their time together was  
obviously coming to an end she had made a last-ditch attempt to impress Polly by  
revealing herself as female to point out how well she had played a male. Polly  
had been profoundly uninterested. Maladicta had been slapped in the face with the  
fact that she had failed to be fascinating, she had failed at something vampires  
were supposed to excel at, the hunting method which brought the victim to the predator.  
She had been bested in the most humiliating way by Polly's indifference.

Now, looking at her poetry, she realized that she hadn't thought beyond a certain  
point. She had wanted to be the object of Polly's desire, but if she had accomplished  
that goal, what next? Reveal that she was female and find Polly was no longer  
interested? Break her heart? Maladicta was stunned to find that both of these  
potential outcomes honestly bothered her, now. That wasn't something her upbringing  
had prepared her for. Vampires lived for the conquest; the concerns of those they  
conquered were not important.

She thought her poetry had improved and that it was as good as any she'd read by  
other vampires. It was still trite, self-centred, egotistical and very, very bad.  
She burned her poetry.

In the last months of the winter she spent more time reading by the light of a candle  
which guttered fitfully in the drafty library. She found an astounding amount of  
poetry by humans in the library, and was somewhat mollified to see that, while some  
of it was quite good, there was also a good deal which was just as bad as her own.

When the weather permitted she walked the parapets in breeches. The thought of  
swanning across them in a diaphanous underwired gown turned her stomach and it was  
far too cold. Besides, the snow and ice thick on the stone would make delicate  
shoes quite dangerous. On clear nights the towers were surrounded by dizzying  
stars, and this seemed the natural draw to the eye. However, something always  
drew her gaze back to the ribbon of road below which led to Munz.

When she picked up her pen she didn't try to force her thoughts into meter and  
rhyme and metaphorical images. She wrote things like, "What am I? Not Vampire,  
not Woman. Polly told me that I am Myself. What am I?" and "Not caring whether  
I'm male or female, perhaps that was a kind of acceptance that I am who I am.  
But I want..." She didn't want to even write it. She wanted Polly to care who  
she was. "I need to know who I am before I can show who I am," she wrote, and  
hated the bouncy rhymey sound of it, but knew it was true. Her chances to show  
herself to Polly had passed, Polly had gone back to the Duchess, to her normal  
life, and probably soon enough would marry and begin having children. Maladicta  
felt hollow and lost at this thought. Sometimes she couldn't understand why she  
continued to wake up and walk around.

Eventually the snow began to melt, the first flies hatched in the puddles and the  
bats of the castle again flew out to feed in the evenings. She watched them  
swarm out and envied them their wings and near invisibility - they could fly to  
Munz, unnoticed. The memory of Polly's scent again filled her mind. Then, late  
one night as she was stargazing and woolgathering into the colder hours, a bat  
flew near her and she caught images from its tiny brain. Polly, crossing a yard,  
with a baby on her hip. Along with the image came the memory of her scent, which  
the bat had picked up from Maladicta's mind and interpreted as a cue to find this  
person. The building which dominated the yard must be The Duchess, Maladicta  
realized. Smaller than she had imagined it might be. But whose was the child?  
Certainly not Polly's, there hadn't been time.

From that point the bats became her eyes into Polly's life, and though the brief  
glimpses served only to increase her longing to be in Polly's presence they gave  
her a new reason to get out of bed. She recognized Shufti from one batty memory,  
in skirts, with her hair grown out and her belly svelte, and she realized that  
must have been her baby. She saw Paul playing with the child, and among the  
random older men she thought she picked out the one who must be their father,  
who looked most like an older version of Ozzer or a smaller Paul.

Then came a morning when a very late-returning bat brought her the image of Polly  
closing the gate of the inn-yard quietly in the predawn gloom. She was wearing  
the ridiculous feminine mascot uniform, but the aura of it was slightly altered  
by the addition of a rucksack with a horse-bow slung off it within easy reach,  
as well as two cutlasses.

Maladicta suddenly felt so vibrantly alive it was almost terrifying. Polly was  
on the move again, life would no longer be boring. A scant, and incredibly busy,  
hour later she was running down the steep footpath through the pines and boulders  
which was the shortest way to the road, skirt collected with one hand to keep it  
from catching on the brambles too much. The dainty feminine boots with their tiny  
heels were murder on the rocks, and she nearly turned her ankles a half-dozen times.

Once on the road she attempted to stroll nonchalantly and be quick at the same time.  
Soon she overtook two people who her nose informed her were girls, though they were  
dressed as boys. Together they approached the waiting ferry on which Polly already  
stood, smiling, next to a rather cowed-looking guard. Maladicta tried to clamp  
down her usual cynically bored expression over her joy. She waited until the  
ferry was in mid-stream before gave Polly a smile that would have been sheepish,  
if sheep had different teeth.

"Thought I'd try again," she said.


End file.
